it is an an aweful and awesome thing to realise how fragile your own mortality is.

perhaps most people survive this cliche, but to realise big bad things don't just happen to other people is fucking midbending and life changing.

it is just a little pathetic it takes such a stupid little thing like some malformed cells and busted tissue to make me wake up.

sleeping beauty

So here's the thing: I'm not me. I know that can sound bitterly cliche, but tragically it also happens to be true.

For weeks now I've felt drifty, confused and generally like I've just climbed out of the whirlygig. Or more likely, I'm just waking up - just groggily coming to consciousness and still in the liminal half dreamspace where both realities exist, but neither one is fully realised.

It's freaking me out.

Partly, life is liberating. Admitting how much I hate this has put me in touch with bigger, wilder emotions than I've felt in a long time (thankfully this includes my long lost libido).

But also, it's insanely weird to feel like the life I've been living is somehow less. Is actually a state of cryogenic deep freeze whereby my everything got lost and I'm only just remembering how this all works. like that freakish mel gibson movie.

so I don't have any answers. I certainly don't have a plan.

and while part of me a freaking out, I keep telling myself that's the type-A bit that persuaded me life in a semi-coma for the last year and I shouldn't listen to her.

remember

this is it people. the year of change.

i'm not above admitting I am terrified and lost, but I am unwilling to keep treading the same disappointment. it's amazingly liberating. and also exhausting, but that okay because...

we are leaving. it is over. the long drawn out break up between me and this life is now officially over.

and in my purge (my shiatzu lady tells me it is the re-balancing of my water element in my kidney that calls for this winter pruning), i have found something I wrote down last September.

Funny I already forgot it, but then I have forgotten a lot of things that were hard to hear in the recent past.

so here, now, is my utterly incomplete but absolutely true list of needs:

- spend time every day just listening to yourself

- do not confuse overwhelming volume of input with meaningful output. distraction isn't the same thing.

- eat only homemade baked goods and sweets. pick your poison. no preservatives or weird shit. ps, bagels are exempt. bread is too until I learn how to make it.

- get local, seasonal fruit and veg (and eat at least 3 every day).

- vary my diet and sleep patterns for different times of year.

- which means you are allowed to give into the winter need for sleep sometimes, just don't let it win.

- lay down every day

- look out the window every day

- stretch every day

- make find and invent occasions for dressing up

- solve domestic issues without just buying things

- start that quilt

- eat dinner at the table at least once a week

- do something completely on my own more often

- be outside every day. really be. even if it's cold and wet and horrible.

- tell my family how I feel. really.

- look after Liam. this is going to be harder for him than it is for you.



here endeth the lesson.